Researchers find flag-wavers “tend to express more racist attitudes than others”:
UWA sociologist and anthropologist Professor Farida Fozdar and a team of assistants surveyed 513 people at last year’s Australia Day fireworks on Perth’s Swan River foreshore. ¶ One in five said they had attached flags to their cars to celebrate Australia Day. ¶ Professor Fozdar said 43 per cent of those with car flags said they believed the now-abandoned White Australia Policy had saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries, while only 25 per cent without flags agreed. ¶ (Non-Europeans were barred from migrating to Australia until after World War II, when immigration restrictions began to ease.) ¶ A total of 56 per cent of people with car flags feared their culture and its most important values were in danger, compared with 34 per cent of non-flaggers. ¶ And 35 per cent of flaggers felt that people had to be born in Australia to be truly Australian, while 23 per cent believed that true Australians had to be Christian, compared with 22 per cent and 18 per cent respectively for non-flaggers.
Henry Reynolds on the history of the Australian flag—or rather, the British blue ensign:
It is true that the flag was chosen following a national competition in 1901. But the competition was a British, not an Australian idea. And it was to choose, not a national flag as such, but an ensign to be flown on ships. It was for this reason that the two ensigns could not be formally adopted until they had been approved by the admiralty. And it was clear at the time that the only possible design for such an ensign was one that carried the union flag in the quadrant and a local symbol on the fly, or “defacing the fly” in the language of flags. With its two ensigns Australia joined the fifty or so other British Colonies that had blue or red ensigns defaced with a local symbol. In other words, it was one of the least original flags in the world. But it was the only type of flag that Australia was permitted to have. The Britishness of the flag, apparent to everyone in 1901, was re-emphasised in 1954 with the passage of the flag act, which for the first time declared the blue ensign to be Australia’s national flag. But in doing so the preamble of the act declared that the Australian flag was the British blue ensign. And if it was the British blue ensign then it must still be so. No other interpretation seems possible. It is, therefore, a very odd symbol to be carried about and worn by true blue patriots who demand you love it or leave.
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Here’s an unusual new iPad game: Fingle. Something like a cross between Eliss and Twister, it’s a two-player finger-tangling game that had Carita and I in stitches.
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Danger 5, a new web series from SBS:
Set in a bizarre, 1960s inspired version of World War II, action comedy series DANGER 5 follows a team of five spies on a mission to kill Adolf Hitler.
The first instalment is out now. From the team behind the utterly demented Italian Spiderman so it should be good.
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Going in and out of court means frequently turning your phone off and on—or, given the slow startup speed of the iPhone, toggling Airplane Mode. Now you can install a one-touch icon on the home screen, rather than fumble for the Settings app. Very handy, and for a range of other settings, too, depending on what you need. (There’s a slicker installer, but I prefer the icons in the first link.)
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Andrew Leigh:
Over recent months, a steady drumbeat has been sounding through the Coalition and more extreme elements of the business community, claiming that a return to the industrial relations system that existed from 2006 to 2009 would boost productivity in Australia. ¶ Alas, there’s precious little evidence to back this up. Productivity growth in Australia peaked in the early-2000s, and has been significantly lower in the naughties than it was in the nineties. If WorkChoices boosted productivity, you might have expected that Australia’s productivity would have soared in the period 2006-2009. But the opposite is true. In the WorkChoices era, labour productivity growth rates were lower than any 3-year period in recent times.
John Quiggin:
The supposed ‘productivity surge’ of the mid-1990s … was the product of measurement errors. The most important was the failure to take account of the increase in the pace and intensity of work. ¶ This speedup, and the resulting problem of work/life balance were described by John Howard as a ‘barbecue stopper’. They were apparent to everyone in Australia except the economists looking at the productivity statistics. ¶ Increased work intensity cannot be sustained forever, so my analysis predicted that the above-average productivity growth would be reversed as Australian workers reclaimed control of their lives in a stronger labour market. ¶ Although work intensity can’t be measured directly, we can look at related measures such as the number of people working extremely long hours and the proportion of workers compensation claims citing stress. These measures have generally declined over the last decade. ¶ As we might expect, the decline in work intensity has produced a reversal of the spurious productivity gains of the 1990s. But the economists who talked up the productivity miracle have not changed their tune.
Bob Gregory:
If we are interested in the productivity slowdown, it would be useful to look at the ABS data. ¶ The worst-performing industry in terms of productivity decline over the last two and half decades is mining. Productivity is lower in that industry than in 1985. ¶ The second worse performing industry is gas, water and electricity. Its productivity is lower than in 1986. ¶ So the first question that needs to be asked is: Why is the productivity of these two important industries — one which is making record profits and one which has been privatised — declining so much? ¶ In none of these cases does any change in industrial relations and labour flexibility laws over the last year or two seem to be the issue. ¶ In these cases, it’s really a matter of declining productivity occurring because we are seeing a lot of investment that is yet to produce output. ¶ Those groups of industry together probably (in my guess) account for somewhere between 40% to 60% of the entire productivity slowdown in Australia. ¶ So it’s quite strange that people are not relating any of the facts to the discussion.
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Bernard Keane on the right-wing protest groups—”the Convoy of No Confidence, the anti-carbon tax protests and efforts such as last week’s anti-gay marriage rally”—that have popped up in recent months:
While the Tea Party (particularly where it overlaps with the birther movement) contains racist elements and there’s a strain of misogyny in the attacks on Gillard, I suggest these groups aren’t driven by overt racism or sexism. The participants in such groups are unlikely to be any more racist or sexist than the rest of us. ¶ Instead, the motivating force behind these groups appears to be more about expressing resentment about social and economic change in recent decades, and particularly because such changes have delivered nothing but difficulties for the demographics we’re talking about: social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heterosexual people and males in particular… ¶ For such people, Gillard’s gender (and unmarried status) or Obama’s race are not so much a problem as a high-profile, indeed inescapable, symbol of how much the world has changed and changed in ways that deliver nothing but pain for such people.
Matt Yglesias sarcastically summed up this argument in relation to the Tea Party: “cranky old white conservative nostalgics aren’t racists, they’re just white people who are nostalgic for a whiter, more racist America”. If you’re unhappy about the real problems facing rural Australia, you don’t fix the blame on faggots if you’re not a disgusting bigot.
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The Guardian now has a Crossword Blog:
Our interest here is not worthy slogging or slaving but the pleasure of solving: the culture of crosswords; the tactical experience; the feelings of frustration, fancy and fun. If you’re an interested newcomer, the blog is here to hold your hand; more obsessed solvers might think of it as a dysfunctional workshop. … Setters are fond of saying that their job is to lose gracefully. I hope this will become a place for graceful winners.
¶ Related: DA’s Meanjin essay on the art of losing gracefully. [prev]
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Two or three times a month, Leslie B. Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor in the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, at the Rockefeller University, is required to feed the subjects under inquiry in her lab. In order to do so, she rolls up her sleeve and inserts her arm into the netting cage in which the creatures in question, mosquitoes, are kept. It’s not unusual for her to get two hundred and fifty bites in a few minutes, she explained the other day, with blasé good humor. ¶ Vosshall is attempting to discover why some people seem more attractive to mosquitoes than others.
As someone who seems to cop more than his fair share of bites, this research interests me greatly—but not, perhaps, as much as the incidental discoveries Vosshall and her team might make:
If you should get bitten, the most effective treatment Vosshall has found is to immediately run the welt under the hottest water tolerable. How this works is as mysterious as the logic of mosquitoes’ blood preferences. “The mosquitoes leave a protein on the skin, so it could be that the hot water cooks it, like cooking an egg,” she suggested. “That’s one idea. The other idea is that you are exchanging one form of pain for another.”
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Way back in 2008, I wished for an iOS port of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! At long last, a clone: osu!stream. It’s the business. [via]
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John Hartigan appeared on 7.30 this week, to distance News Corp’s Australian operation from its vile British counterpart. The most interesting thing he said was this:
The Australian … is very strident in the way that it covers politics and I’d argue it’s really the only newspaper in Australia that properly covers politics, national politics.
News Ltd “controls 70 per cent of combined national and metropolitan media newspaper markets”, including “monopolies in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and a range of provincial centres like Townsville, Cairns and Geelong”—but its Chief Executive Officer says that only one of its dozens of newspapers covers politics properly. Disgraceful.
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Marcus Westbury:
The Arty Bollocks Generator … generates a statement of sufficient density and confusion that it is almost indistinguishable from the kind of jargon that unfortunately populates many exhibition catalogues, CVs and funding applications. ¶ Hit “Generate some bollocks” and the ABG spits out such gems as “what starts out as vision soon becomes corroded into a dialectic of power, leaving only a sense of nihilism and the inevitability of a new understanding” to describe your work.
¶ See also: Charlotte Young’s Artist’s Statement.
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I was disappointed to hear that my old university, Notre Dame, has put corporate sponsorship ahead of academic rigour, hosting an anti-science propaganda lecture. Natalie Latter explains the problem:
At the bidding of one of its benefactors (Hancock Prospecting, which is sponsoring Monckton’s lecture) the university is lending its hard won credibility to Monckton, who has none of his own. ¶ Notre Dame has a responsibility to preserve the integrity of academic and scientific research by standing with other Australian universities in condemning figures such as Monckton. These figures misrepresent and undermine the work of those who uphold academic standards. ¶ It is grossly inappropriate for a university to provide such views with a platform.
Sadly, no academics at Notre Dame have signed the open letter.
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One of a dozen things you didn’t know about early Melbourne: “The site of Melbourne was a well-known Aboriginal gathering spot with its own bridge across the Yarra.” ¶ More recently, the Yarra has been shortlisted for the 2011 RiverPrize—thanks to recent efforts to undo the damage caused to the river since that Aboriginal gathering spot was seized.
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The Clock is a 200-foot tall timepiece built into a mountain. It will play 3.5 million unique melodies, and will keep good time for at least 10 000 years even if nobody visits. [via]
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Verity Stob reviews the beta version of English V3.31:
By the way, an alternative spelling proposal, which aimed to differentiate better between so-called ‘British’ English and its assorted inferior knock-offs, has been resoundingly rejected to the disappointment of many. The idea, backed by the Tourist Board among others, was to boost the general kookynicity of British spellings in general and word endings in particular. In short, to take the ball introduced by such pairings as analogue/analog, colour/color and programme/program and run it out of the gridiron and over the try line. ¶ For example, the noun ‘dog’ was to be respelled ‘dogue’, giving it a 66% boost in angliosity…
[via]
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Tracy McNeil launched her album, Fire From Burning, at the Bella Union bar last Saturday night. [previously]
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Newswordy: a word-of-the-day service highlighting the use and abuse of political and media jargon. [via]
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ABC’s On Trial has unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to the prosecution, defence, and court staff—but not jurors—in NSW and WA. On the strength of the first episode, I think this should be compulsory viewing for school students. You can catch up here.
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Nicholas de Monchaux on the spacesuit:
For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. … The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program. ¶ But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing. ¶ The spacesuit, in the end, is an object that crystallizes a lot of ideas about who we are and what the nature of the human body may be—but, then, crucially, it’s also an object in which many centuries of ideas about the relationship of our bodies to technology are reflected.
[via]
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Roseanne on Roseanne:
I wanted to do a realistic show about a strong mother who was not a victim of Patriarchal Consumerist Bullshit—in other words, the persona I had carefully crafted over eight previous years in dive clubs and biker bars: a fierce working-class Domestic Goddess. It was 1987, and it seemed people were primed and ready to watch a sitcom that didn’t have anything like the rosy glow of middle-class confidence and comfort, and didn’t try to fake it. […] ¶ Call me immodest—moi?—but I honestly think Roseanne is even more ahead of its time today, when Americans are, to use a technical term from classical economics, screwed. […] ¶ [But] Hollywood hates labor, and hates shows about labor worse than any other thing. And that’s why you won’t be seeing another Roseanne anytime soon. Instead, all over the tube, you will find enterprising, overmedicated, painted-up, capitalist whores claiming to be housewives. But I’m not bitter.
I’ve been watching Roseanne again, starting from the beginning; I’m up to episode 13, around the time the show’s “creator” left. Knowing what was going on behind the scenes makes Barr’s achievement—a show that is realistic, loving, intensely political but, above all, funny—all the more remarkable. [via]
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